Our opinion: An Iranian AIDS researcher is free at last. The UAlbany community is enriched by the perseverance of the Alaei brothers.
Dr. Arash Alaei will be forever known on the campus of the University at Albany, and in the liberated world beyond it, for his AIDS research. So will his brother, Dr. Kamiar Alaei, who is finishing his doctoral dissertation in public health there. It’s in their native country of Iran that they’re regarded as criminals.
That’s a distinction that ought to be celebrated at UAlbany, now that Arash Alaei has been freed from the same Iranian gulag where his brother previously was imprisoned as well and allowed to leave his native country. They are being reunited, as crusaders for public health and examplars of perseverance.
Allegedly plotting to overthrow the oppressive government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So goes the spin and subsequent prosecution in a country afraid of the truth about AIDS.
Just four years ago, Arash and Kamiar Alaei were merely doctors, not political prisoners. Their presentation at UAlbany on the AIDS clinics they operated was enough to make Arash Alaei part of the university community, just like his brother.
All it took to transform them, in the eyes of the Iranian government, was to try to help their native country better treat such a devastating disease.
Their attendance at a conference on AIDS in 2007, where they shared information about their research, was too much for a country where frank discussion of sex or drugs or AIDS is regarded as subversion.
Kamiar Alaei spent two years in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison. Arash Alaei was incarcerated there from December 2008 until late August. That he is free at all, especially after originally being given a six-year sentence, is testament to the perseverance of his brother, of course, but also to many others at UAlbany.
We can’t wait to hear more about Arash Alaei’s release.
UAlbany, meantime, is wise to embrace what the Alaei family represents. Oh, the lessons of resilience they can teach — in the more controlled environment of medical science, of course, but also in an unpredictable world where good forever confronts evil.